Leonardo Da Vinci’s Drawings have Unique Microbiomes, Study Finds

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Leonardo da Vinci's drawings have unique microbiomes, study finds:

Microbiomes are all the scientific rage, even in art conservation, where studying the microbial species that congregate on works of art may lead to new ways to slow down the deterioration of priceless aging artwork, as well as potentially unmask counterfeits. For instance, scientists have analyzed the microbes found on seven of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. And back in March, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) collected and analyzed swabs taken from centuries-old art in a private collection housed in Florence, Italy, and published their findings in the journal Microbial Ecology.

[...] Guadalupe Pinar and her team at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, collaborated with conservators from the Instituto Centrale per la Patologa degli Archivi e del Libro (ICPAL) for the microbiome analysis of the Leonardo da Vinci drawings. [...]

For this latest paper, Pinar's team turned to a third-generation sequencing method known as Nanopore, which uses protein nanopores embedded in a polymer membrane for sequencing. It comes with a portable, pocket-size sensing device, the MinION, making it ideal for cultural heritage studies. For the Leonardo drawings, Pinar et al. combined the Nanopore sequencing with a whole-genome-amplification protocol.

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